Miracle of Saint Francis Xavier

Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima in 1549, and the Jesuits later reported that he had brought a dead girl back to life there. By the time Poussin painted the scene, the order had been shut out of Japan altogether. The shogunate had banned Christianity and expelled the last Europeans two years earlier, so the picture is a memory of a mission that no longer existed.

It was ordered in 1641 by Sublet de Noyers, the superintendent of the king's buildings, for the high altar of the Jesuit novitiate chapel in Paris. Poussin had just been summoned from Rome to work for Louis XIII, and he complained in a letter that summer that the canvas, 4.4 metres tall, was too big to fit inside his studio. He went back to Rome the next year and stayed there.

When the Jesuits were suppressed in France the painting was bought for Louis XV in 1763, and it was already hanging in the Louvre when the museum opened to the public in 1793.